Alright, I’m a little confused. I thought the Bush administration started their domestic spying program long before 9/11:

http://www.michaelmoore.com/wo…..hp?id=5514

What am I missing here about Mukasey’s claim that 9/11 could have been stopped if the U.S. government would have been allowed to monitor overseas calls?

- Tom

“The president has to have a circle around him of people who can give him advice in confidence and understand that they are not going to be called to account,” the attorney general said. Otherwise, he said, “he will not get candid advice.”

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/…..9VROE9.DTL

In defending the need for executive privilege, Mukasey artlessly conflates it with the administration’s greatest aspiration and its greatest problem – that lack of accountability. Without it, there’s no check on excess, no correction for incompetence, no straightening the inevitable veering off course.

Scott Horton points out today another hypocrisy in Mukasey’s speech: his claims that the DOJ’s public integrity section is apolitical and that he’s seen “no evidence” of political prosecution in his department. As the Chronicle article cited above pointed out, Mukasey would be more convincing had he said that without so tightly closing his eyes and his mind.

Thanks you so much for all your work while EW was away. Your work and effort superb!

EW, HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!! And thank you for the past year’s writing and investigating!

Props to both of you!

Actually, I rather think that Mukasey possibly does carry around with his a special sense of responsibility. Remember, he tried four major al-Qaeda cases between about 1995 and 2001 in the Southern District of NY, those transcripts being some of the best “intelligence” on what al-Qaeda was all about as anything the CIA had in hand. Steve Simon and Daniel Benjamin used them extensively in their book, “The Age of Sacred Terror” and in the notes have cited the URL’s to the on-line transcripts. Simon and Benjamin note that DOJ and CIA never cross referenced the trial evidence with their FBI and CIA files, but they claim in many way it was a more complete picture than what they had available at the NSC during Clinton’s second term. Mukasey had to make many rulings on evidence that could be used at trial, and he apparently took great pains not to admit testimony and exhibits that went to a conspiracy beyond the actual charges, meaning that he forclosed a narrative that encompased all these cases. He did the First WTC Bombing Case, the Blind Sheik case, the Embassy Bombing Cases — some of these were multiple trials, for instance Ramzi Yousef’s trial, was seperate from the first WTC bombing trial. Given that all of these cases included evidence presented as substitutions, Mukasey would have had to rule on many matters where he accessed raw intelligence. In many respects he probably knew more about the whole al-Qaeda topic than almost anyone else in the US prior to 9/11, and that is a fairly heavy burden. His courtroom was a few blocks from the towers, one might even say what he could have added up from his own knowledge as the towers came down just might be the kind of bias that would make some of his deep seeded even unconscious emotions inappropriate for an AG. But I rather doubt if his emotional responses are inauthentic, and suspect his “wiretapping” beliefs — maybe even his torture ones, are profoundly influenced by his special knowledge, and color how he would approach simply, the law.

Narrowly focused intelligence and law enforcement operations do rely on secrecy of particular means and methods, but the Bush administration’s efforts to check out everything went outside that scope. And do the administration team think that the bad guys don’t know about wireless intercepts; about splitters and about automated deep packet inspection and semantic analysis; about National Security Letters? No, but hoodwinking the public about who knows what is an indispensable part of the Bush administration game plan, and most Members of Congress have gone along with or actively boosted that game plan.

…hundreds of thousands of citizens, if not millions, have fought and died to protect and uphold. If Mukasey cannot understand this, and keep it in perspective with his grief, then he is not freaking fit to serve. End of story.

Point well taken.
I do, however, think that Mukasey (like millions of others) has been traumatized. In his case, it’s obviously very immediate – working near the WTC, and I’m sure he had friends who perished. People do strange things when they are traumatized. But your point remains valid; people didn’t fight wars and those lying in military graves deserve to have the Constitution better served. On that point, I suspect that we heartily agree.

said he found it “suspicious” that the White House had not recovered “old data” prior to the switch from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook